Cast

Directed by

Whatever the faults of "Tank Girl," lack of ambition
is not one of them.

Here
is a movie that dives into the bag of filmmaking tricks and chooses all of
them. Trying to re-create the multimedia effect of the comic books it's based
on, the film employs live action, animation, montages of still graphics,
animatronic makeup, prosthetics, song-and-dance routines, models, fake
backdrops, holography, title cards, matte drawings and computerized special effects.
All I really missed were 3-D and Smell-O-Vision.

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The
movie is set in the year 2033, after a meteor has struck the Earth, creating a
global desert. "You gotta squeeze 12 in a bathtub," Tank Girl tells
us in the opening narration, "...so it ain't all bad." The planet is
mostly ruled by the evil Water & Power Co., run by a madman named Kesslee
(Malcolm McDowell), who controls most of the water supply and whose name is
possibly a misspelled anagram of "leaks." Living outside the W&P
sphere is a small group of self-sufficient desert rats, who pump water by hand
to grow hydroponic crops. Tank Girl (Lori Petty) is one of their number, and
when Kesslee's troops attack the commune, she wipes out eight of them before
she's hauled before the evil monster himself.

McDowell,
who has specialized lately in weirdo villains, thinks she might be useful in
his war on the Rippers (anagram of Sippers? - oh, never mind).

They're
kangaroo-men who were developed in a DNA experiment, as Ultimate Soldiers:
They're smart as men, can hop like crazy, and always have a place to keep their
grenades. (The actors playing them, including Ice-T, are a little easier to
identify than the stars of "Planet of the Apes.") Some Rippers
remember life before their DNA got manipulated; one solemnly tells Tank Girl,
"I used to be Ted Smith, assistant manager of Chief Auto Parts in
Cincinnati, Ohio." Tank Girl refuses the chance to work for Kesslee, and
after making a friend of the shy Jet Girl (Naomi Watts), she wages war against
Water & Power, in scenes involving lots of machine guns, tanks, planes,
grenades, electrocution, and even a weapon that is plunged into the victim,
draining his blood while simultaneously purifying it into water.

Under
the direction of Rachel Talalay, the movie plunges headlong into technique.
Some of the locations, like the desert commune, are obviously scale models.
Others are elaborate sets, including the dark satanic mills where Kesslee sets
his slaves to work. Tank Girl careens through this landscape with an evil snicker
and incredible good luck, dodging death and causing a lot of pain to the
genital areas of her enemies. She talks back to her captors ("Hey! I have
two words for you: Brush your teeth!"). She smiles at the camera in a
heroically gratuitous Busby Berkeley dance routine.

And
of course she prevails.

Enormous
energy went into this movie. I could not, however, care about it for much more
than a moment at a time, and after a while its manic energy wore me down.

Director
Sidney Lumet has a new book out about how to make movies. In it he observes
that slowly-paced scenes can actually make a movie seem to go faster than a
relentless pacing that never stops.

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